The silence afterwards is eerie. My hearing starts to come back, muffled, and my head is still spinning from whatever shit was in that dope, but someone is pulling me, dragging me up, and making me move from my safe little corner.
“Please don’t,” I whimper.
“Don’t look,” a voice says. His voice.
And he pulls me close, throwing one arm around my waist so he can half-carry me, and the other around my face, keeping it smushed into his chest.
“You need to stop wearing Old Spice,” I hiccup, and try to look up, but I’m losing him, I’m losing the whole world, it’s slipping away from me…
I feel my head throbbing first, the back of it. Then my mouth starts to ache, and my nose. I cough, and then I cough and cough again, my throat dry and sore.
“Lie down, angel.”
I didn’t even realize I was trying to get up, but I must have been, because calm, warm hands push my shoulders back down to the bed.
I’m on a bed.
I crack my eyes, very slightly, and sigh in relief when the light in the room is dim, warm, minimal.
“Here.” Something trails over my lips and I open them hopefully. “Suck.”
That’s something I can definitely do. But, aw, it’s just a straw. Still, I suck up the tepid water gratefully. It helps my throat. I clear it twice, three times, and then open my eyes a little more.
It’s my husband. Only, it can’t be, because whoever this guy is, he’s smiling, and he has a gentle, relieved look in his eyes.
I’ve never seen Luca looking at me like this, not even when I saved his life that one time.
“What—” I croak, before I have to cough again.
“You don’t have to worry about anything, angel.”
And then my husband, or at least whoever it is who skinned him and is wearing him as a very lifelike Luca-suit, leans down to kiss my forehead, my nose, and then gently, so gently, my split lip.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice getting stronger.
“You really don’t have to worry about anything right now. Trust me on that.”
I glare at him this time, although it makes my face hurt to squint my eyes as necessary for the glare. “What. Happened?”
He lets out a little sigh. “Well, let’s see. You smoked up, and then—”
“Tommy!” I remember, and try to sit up again. But it only makes me dizzy, and Luca shushes me, pulling me into his arms and supporting me like a baby, but at least I’m a little more vertical than I was. “Ugh. What happened to that fucker?”
“He’s gone,” Luca says briefly.
“Gone where?”
And then I remember. The noise, the stink of fresh blood. “What did you do with the…”
Luca’s voice sounds more like his usual tone when he says: “Here’s one instance where ‘sleeping with the fishes’ could apply.”
I shudder. Luca’s casualness makes me feel a tad queasy, like my stomach’s about to flip-flop. To distract myself from the nausea, I look around the room. It’s the master suite again, and there’s a chair pushed up under the door handle of the entrance. “We’re safe in here,” Luca assures me, when he sees where I’m looking. “I’m just waiting for Frankie to get back to me with some information, but I’m pretty sure that guy was the only Fuscone plant on board.”
I stare up at my husband. “How do you know it was Fuscone?”
“Who else?”
Fair point. “Why aren’t I tied up in a bathroom? I didn’t exactly behave myself, did I?”
He flinches. I’ve never seen the man flinch before, either. A day of firsts. Flinching implies some kind of vulnerability.
He puts me back down on the bed and only then opens his mouth to say something, but he’s saved by the phone. “Go back to sleep,” he tells me.
I close my eyes and pretend, but I’m listening, not sleeping.
“Frank,” he says, answering it. There’s a long pause, and I can hear Brother Frank squawking through the phone. He sounds panicked. Luca is calm, though, when he replies. “I see,” is all he says when the monologue is done. He’s thoughtful. Unhurried. Frank asks a question; I can hear it in the inflection. “What it means, Frank, is that Tino’s grip is loosening, and Fuscone thinks he’s the chosen one. So keep an eye on it and stay safe until I get back.” Another question. “Me? Why, Frankie, I’m going to enjoy my honeymoon. What else would I do?”
He hangs up and I can feel him looking at me. My man’s eyes are like lasers; they sting when they hit. “You can stop pretending now,” he says, so I do.
I struggle to sit up in the bed again and he comes to help me. “I never thought I’d see you playing nurse,” I tell him. There are so many things I want to say to him, mostly of the Fuck you variety, but there’s a bandage over my head and all my struggles are making it shift over my eyes, my face. I pull at it, tugging it off.
“Don’t do that—great, now you’re bleeding again,” he sighs.
I’ve wrestled my way to the side of the bed and I sit there, legs hanging over the side, panting. There’s a towel padded up on the pillow where my head was, stained crimson, and when I put a hand to the back of my head, it comes away sticky. Sticky and red.
I’m still in my shorts, and there’s red on them too, and on my legs. Only that blood is dry. I remember the explosions, the gun going off right next to me. This isn’t my blood.
And I remember Luca’s face when he burst through that door, enraged and alive with hatred. Hatred for poor old fake-deckhand Tommy, though. Not me.
Poor old fake-deckhand Tommy who was about to kill me, and I realized in that split-second that I didn’t want to leave
